Hollywood sends Scorsese a message — again
Ever get the feeling that Hollywood, paraphrasing Sally Field’s words after winning her second Academy Award, “really, really” doesn’t care so much for Martin Scorsese?
His pictures, mostly with a mean-streets theme, keep getting nominated for Oscars. Then on the big night, the acclaimed director becomes the equivalent of Susan Lucci at the Daytime Emmy Awards.
That storyline played out again Sunday night at the 96th Oscar ceremony. “Killers of the Flower Moon” was seen as the possible fallback choice for voters tired of hearing about “Oppenheimer” and not wishing to embrace “Barbie.”
The fall release included some of the director’s stock company. Robert De Niro and Leonardo Dicaprio look as cozy in a Scorsese movie as Ward Bond for John Ford in Westerns starring John Wayne.
De Niro and Di Caprio are Oscar winners — the former for playing boxer Jake La Motta in 1990’s “Raging Bull,” decidedly not a date movie, and Di Caprio for playing Rick Dalton, whose best pal (Brad Pitt, playing Cliff Booth) was honored in 2019 for a supporting role, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”
So, too, is Scorsese, widely known as Marty, like the title character in the 1955 Best Picture, starring Ernest Borgnine as a butcher. He deserved one long before “The Departed” in 2006 with Jack Nicholson, Di Caprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg tackling a complicated script with a predictably violent ending.
Hollywood is not much on sympathy votes; no one knew that like the late Orson Welles, whose “Citizen Kane” is recognized as the Mount Everest of movies but received only a single Oscar — that, with Herman J. Mankiewicz, for screenplay — at the 1942 awards.
Tinseltown is quick to honor Luise Rainer and Frances Mcdormand (five Best Actress wins between them) and then discover, perhaps after reading the star’s obituary, that Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy and Lana Turner never won a competitive award. That Cary Grant was so snubbed and Paul Newman had to wait so long for an Oscar is shameful.
Yet, here we are in 2024, when the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union rebuttal is filmed in someone’s kitchen and the director of a billion-dollar box-office smash (see Gerta Gerwig and “Barbie”) gets her comeuppance from the industry.
Movies have changed, certainly how to watch them, much faster than the industry. Sound, as even Charles Chaplin learned, is here to stay and, in some cases, the ticket-buying public has made its choices before Oscar night.
I cannot fault the selection of “Oppenheimer” as Best Picture, winner in seven of 13 categories. Director Christopher Nolan, actor Cillian Murphy and supporting actor Robert Downey Jr. were honored in the three-hour tale about the American physicist who devised the atomic bomb. This movie had legs, as they say in the business, for a summer release, a thinking-man’s film with a little-known star and scant room for a female storyline.
For that, people flocked to see “Barbie,” released on the same weekend as “Oppenheimer,” but whose director and star (Margot Robbie) were non-nominees. Billie Eilish, someone whose name I keep hearing at awards time in one genre or another, won for a song that she performed during the live ceremony, hosted by ABC late-show host Jimmy Kimmel.
With Scorsese, De Niro and fellow nominee/past winner Jodie Foster in the audience, they could have invited Harvey Keitel and Cybill Shepherd for a cast party of “Taxi Driver.” But as in 1977 (“Taxi Driver”), in 1981 (“Raging Bull”) and in 1991 (“Goodfellas”), Hollywood looked in another direction on Oscar night.
Scorsese earned critical acclaim once for telling a boxer’s sad tale; he should make another, this one a remake of one about Rocky Graziano (played by Paul Newman), and call it “Someone Up There Doesn’t Like Me.”